European LegalHistoryNewsletter of the Max Planck Institute,October 2019 #27

OpportunitiesWe are looking for three new colleaguesto join the Institute's research projects.

CFA: Post-doctoral researcher (m/f/d)or Doctoral student (m/f/d) in theresearch group Translations andTransitions: Legal Practice in 19th-Century Japan, China, and the

Upcoming events7 October 2019, 15:00-17:00,Workshop: Gender and Sexualities inLegal History, organised by Luisa StellaCoutinho (MPIeR)

8 October 2019, 17:00, Norms andEmpires Lecture Series: BetweenCitizenship and Foreignness. Free People

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We are delighted to welcome you to our newsletter. It is designed foreveryone with an interest in legal history, global history, or legalstudies. The Max Planck Institute for European Legal Historyinvestigates the history and development of law in Europe and beyond.In our monthly newsletter, we keep you updated about events at theInstitute, new publications by our fellows, and other news about thefield. For comments, suggestions, and general feedback, please emailus. We hope you enjoy this month's issue.

Ottoman Empire, Deadline: 31 October2019The successful candidate will beresponsible for developing and carryingout a project on the transformation ofconceptions of law and the practice(s) ofdecision-making in China during the lateQing period and early 20th century (until1937).

CFA: Doctoral student (m/f/d) in theLOEWE subprojectKonzernarchitektur. Bauliche undrechtliche Ordnungsregime derkorporativen Moderne, Deadline: 31October 2019The successful candidate will develop,coordinate and carry out a researchproject on the genesis of 'corporatearchitecture' in the late 19th century.

CFA: Researcher (m/f/d) in the projectDiccionario Histórico de DerechoCanónico en Hispanoamérica yFilipinas siglos XVI-XVIII, Deadline: 11November 2019The successful candidate will undertakeeditorial work on the dictionary and havethe opportunity for conducting their ownresearch closely related to thedictionary's themes.

Further details

of Color during the Age of AtlanticRevolutions, Federica Morelli (Universityof Turin) 

9 October 2019, 10:00-17:30,Workshop RISE-MPIeR: Diálogos entreHistória e Direito na África, organised byMariana Dias Paes (MPIeR)

10 October 2019, 16:30, ResearchColloquium: The origins and legacies ofthe British West Indian Slave Legislation:When periphery becomes the centre,Justine Collins (MPIeR)

14 October 2019, 15:15, CommonLaw Research Seminar: LegalEducation as a Tool of Professionalizationin England (1850-1900), Zeynep Yazici-Caglar (MPIeR)

16 October 2019, 14:30-16:30,Workshop Methods and Sources:Glocalising Normativities, organised byManuel Bastias Saavedra (MPIeR)

16 October 2019, 18:15, FrankfurterRechtshistorische Abendgespräche:Current doctrines and similar petitions:capitalist legal logic among native andenslaved litigants in Spanish America,Bianca Premo (Florida InternationalUniversity)

17 October 2019, 10:00-13:00, Meetthe Author: Bianca Premo, TheEnlightenment on Trial: Ordinary Litigantsand Colonialism in the Spanish Empire

More events

PublicationsRechtsgeschichte – Legal History27 (2019)

The first article in the new issue of the Rgis unfortunately also the last publication

of António Manuel Hespanha, who was aclose associate of the Max PlanckInstitute for European Legal History formany years. To our great regret, hepassed away only a few weeks before thejournal went to press. His contributionsummarises the prosopographical workon Portuguese lawyers of the earlymodern period carried out over the lastthree decades, which sheds light on thesocial origins, education and careerpatterns of both scholars and

practitioners of law in the Lusophone world.

The second essay in the Research section is by Jean-Louis Halpérin. It dealswith the surprising connection between criminal law and the law of nationsat German-speaking universities from the 16th to the early 20th centuries –long before the advent of international criminal law.

The Council of Trent’s (1545-1563) debates and decisions are the startingpoint of the issue’s first thematic Focus, ‘Tridentine Marriage’. Ten authorsexamine the effects and implications of the marriage law reforms enactedby the council in a variety of different regions around the world (Europe,Pakistan, Japan, the Philippines, Latin America) up to the 19th century.

To mark the 100th anniversary of the Weimar Constitution, the secondFocus section, ‘Translating Weimar’, addresses the text’s transnationalresonance. Five contributions analyse local perspectives from Asia, LatinAmerica and the Common Law World.

This year’s Forum takes a closer look at the two handbooks on legal historypublished last year by Oxford University Press. Focusing on specific themesrelated to their own fields of expertise, researchers from our Institute reviewthe volumes and offer their own comments on the discussion on the state ofthe discipline.

Luckily, the book review section treats more than just two books. As always,the books reviewed have been published within the past two years. Ourpolicy of trying to commission reviews in a language other than thepublication’s is aimed at facilitating the transfer of knowledge acrosslinguistic, regional and disciplinary boundaries.

Finally, Anette Baumann shares her observations on the evidentiaryinspection practices of the Reichskammergericht (1495-1806), and hasselected a number of inspection maps (Augenscheinkarten) to illustrate theprint edition of the journal.

In keeping with our established practice, this issue of the Rg is availableboth in print (Verlag Vittorio Klostermann) and online in Open Access on thejournal's new website.

 

Two new publications in the Max PlanckInstitute for European Legal HistoryResearch Paper Series

Thomas Duve's Pragmatic Normative Literatureand the Production of Normative Knowledge inthe Early Modern Iberian Empires in the 16th–17th Centuries shows how handbooks and othertexts aimed at practitioners produced by clericalauthors played a key role in the knowledgeeconomy of the early modern Iberian empires.They covered questions of right or wrong in all areas of life, be it in theconfessional, the treatment of indigenous peoples, or trade practices.Exploring the role and function of these media is key to understanding hownormative knowledge was translated into practice and how practices in turncontributed to knowledge production in the Iberian world during the 16thand 17th centuries.

The second paper is part of the Institute's project Historical Dictionary ofCanon Law in Hispanic America and the Philippines. 16th-18th Centuries(DCH), which aims to provide information about key concepts of earlymodern ecclesiastical law in Hispanic America and the Philippines. Based onboth the normative and prescriptive literature of the time, Javier Villa Flores'article Falseadores (DCH) discusses the legal understanding of the crime offorgery on both sides of the Iberian Atlantic. The seriousness of the crimelay not so much in the act of lying or of malicious concealment, but in theintentional abuse of public trust through fraud.

Featured EventFrankfurter RechtshistorischeAbendgespräche

Current doctrines and similarpetitions: capitalist legal logic among

native and enslaved litigants inSpanish America

Bianca Premo (Florida InternationalUniversity)

16 October 2019, 18:15,  lecture hall ofthe Institute

This talk focuses on the devaluation ofcasuistic argumentation not only among legal minds but also amongordinary litigants in the 18th-century Spanish American colonies. It isparticularly concerned with how experiments with new ways of thinkingabout legal logic linked temporal and economic ideas. Enslaved and nativelitigants began to advance a fundamentally capitalist logic of legalargumentation in the late 1700s. In civil suits aired in royal courts againstsuperiors, unlettered litigants from unlikely places such as Trujillo, Peru andSouthern Mexico played with new notions of time, value and law – conceptsthat are conventionally thought to be the provenance of Europeanintellectuals, especially German philosophers. Their allusions to legal truthand value in the civil cases they brought against masters and communityleaders departed from the casuistic mode of legal epistemology inheritedfrom the pan-European civil law tradition, veering into a new way of legalway thinking about time that contained kernels of capitalist logic, especiallyconcepts of speculation and type.

Summer Academy 2019A Retrospective

In August this year, Iwas part of afortunate group ofpeople chosen toparticipate in thisyear’s SummerAcademy for LegalHistory at the MaxPlanck Institute forEuropean LegalHistory. Running since 2014 in its current format, the two-week SummerAcademy is one of the signature events of the Institute and attracts young

legal history scholars from all over the world.

Being an international lawyer with a strong interest in legal history but not alegal historian myself, I followed the events through a special lens as a ‘non-expert’. In my opinion the unique features of the academy were itsacademic rigour, its internationality and its interdisciplinarity.

First things first: the Academy is very demanding. The research of theparticipants is discussed in depth and renowned scholars provide insightsinto their fields of interests. How the discussions evolve is a result of theAcademy’s design. While in the past, legal history used to be an intellectualexercise often constrained by national borders, the atmosphere at theAcademy was shaped by the different backgrounds of the participantscoming from all corners of the world. Another decisive aspect was that theacademic starting points of the participants spanned a broad range andincluded training in history, law and philosophy. This was especially fruitfulfor exploring this year’s topic of the Academy: 'Law in Texts and Contexts'.As it turned out, the conceptions of both 'context' and 'law' frequentlydiffered according to one’s academic lens.

However, the social aspects were just as noteworthy as the academic ones.The program was complemented by social activities ranging from tours ofthe adjacent university campus to attending the Institute’s summer party.Especially during these events I found that the Academy allowed us to forgea network of fellow researches and friends that will stay with us togetherwith the professional experiences.

Fabian Simon Eichberger is a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute forComparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg

Guests and Visiting ScholarsBrito Monteiro, Ivone de Fátima (Universidade de Cabo Verde, Cidadeda Praia, Cape Verde): Os fundamentos da luta pela adjacência de CaboVerde (Séc. XIX), visiting October 2019Carlos, Elter Manuel (Universidade de Cabo Verde, Cidade da Praia, CapeVerde): Corpo Submisso e Resistência na Dança do Batuku, visiting October2019Censi, Damiano (Università degli Studi di Ferrara, Italy): A reconstructionof European economic governance through the legislative andjurisprudential route of the role of the European Parliament, visiting October– November 2019Cobo, Natalie (Brasenose College, University of Oxford, UK): Translating

Solórzano, visiting October 2019Conceição Gomes, Lourenço (Universidade de Cabo Verde, Cidade daPraia, Cape Verde): Discursos e narrativas sobre resistência camponesa emBabo Verde no Século XIX, visiting October 2019Domínguez Benito, Héctor (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain):The end of an empire – Titles over territories in Spanish and Ibero-Americaninternational law, 1810-1928, visiting July – December 2019Espelt-Bombin, Silvia (University of Exeter, UK): Peace- and Treaty-Making: Different Legal Systems in Action in Early Modern Amazonia andthe Guianas, visiting October – December 2019Girón Zúñiga, Nicolás (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiagode Chile, Chile): Prácticas y representaciones de corrupción en el marco delproceso de construcción estatal de Chile decimonónico (1830-1891), visitingOctober 2019Guanche, Julio César (FLASCO, Quito, Ecuador): La ciudadanía republicanen Cuba. (1902-2002). Un studio integral, visiting July – December 2019 Guevara Gil, Jorge Armando (Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru):Transgression, abjection and unfruitful pain. The case of Sister DomingaGutierrez de Cossio (Arequipa, Peru, 1831), visiting October 2019 –September 2020Hallebeek, Jan (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, Netherlands): Ausgabe undÜbersetzung der Glossen zur Jurisprudentia Frisica (Codex Roorda), visitingOctober 2019Ijeoma, Winner (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt, Germany): Contracts, tradeand British legal transplants in 19th-century Nigeria and Ghana, visitingOctober 2019 – March 2020Losano, Mario (Università degli Studi di Torino, Italia): Le tre constituzionipacifiste, visiting October 2019Sagredo Baeza, Rafael (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiagode Chile, Chile): Rebellion and Resistance in the Iberian Empires, 16th-19thcenturies, visiting September – Oktober 2019Matsumori, Natsuko (University of Shizuoka, Japan): Conquest, Empire,and Sovereignty: the Natural Right of Communication in the 'New World',visiting August – October 2019

Hansaallee 41

Podcast: Grenzen der FreiheitKonrad Duden (Max Planck Institute forComparative and International PrivateLaw) and Jasper Kunstreich recentlycontributed to a podcast discussingfreedom and the rule of law. Theyfocused on how the recent rise of populistand autocratic governments is affectingjudicial independence and the separationof powers. While it might seem that thatthe rule of law and democratic institutionsare sound in Germany, we arenevertheless not isolated fromdevelopments taking place elsewhere.Looking closely, one can observe smalldigs being taken at the judiciary, but alsoat the press and at scientists, which showthat even in Germany, a functioningdemocracy and respect for the rule of lawshould not be taken for granted. JasperKunstreich and Konrad Duden thereforeencouraged listeners to be particularlyalert to possible challenges to democraticinstitutions and to stand up in theirdefence, but also to practice constructivecriticism of them.

Jasper Kunstreich and Konrad Duden werecontributing to a longer podcast producedand published by detektor.fm, a digitalradio station based in Leipzig with aspecial focus on culture, politics andscience, in cooperation with the MaxPlanck Society. The podcast also featuredLorraine Daston, director emerita of theMax Planck Institute for the History ofScience, who discussed the historicaldevelopment of the ideas behind the ruleof law and scientific freedom. Christian

Schrödinger's DragonBuilding upon the cooperationbetween the MPIs in the greaterregion, the four Frankfurt institutes—biophysics, brain research, legalhistory and empirical aesthetics—puttogether a team to compete in theannual dragon boat race held inconnection with the Museumsuferfest.After just two training sessions,'Quantum Dragon' was ready to takeon the other 31 teams on 24 August.

Although we had a poor start in thefirst heat, a few tactical adjustments inthe next round propelled us to astrong 2nd place. Since we didn't winthe second heat, however, our hope ofgetting into the quarterfinals was up inthe air—a state of being all toofamiliar to Schrödinger's cat. Just asthe cat's fate remained uncertain untilacted upon by an external party, sotoo Quantum Dragon's fate rested inthe hands of other teams racing in thenext heat and a lottery process.

The outcome? Let's just say that thecat didn't make it. While we wereeager to show what we were trulycapable of, our hopes were dashedwhen we did not get one of lotteryslots for the quarterfinals.

We look forward to next year.

James Thompson

Hann from the Max Planck Institute forEthnological Research in Hallecontributed his findings on how certainpolitical ideals are recalibrated inEurope’s rural areas when combined withboth feelings of nostalgia and pragmaticneeds.

You can access the podcast via the MPGand on the radio station's own website.  

Konrad Duden & Jasper Kunstreich

Max Planck Newsletter for Ibero-American Legal History

If you find this newsletter interesting, you might also be interested inthe special newsletter for Ibero-American Legal History, which ispublished monthly by our research group 'Legal History of Ibero-America'. You can subscribe under the following link.

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